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Thousands were crammed into the Walmart in Los Cabos, Mexico, on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 14, as a storm pelted the building. Throngs of people mobbed the nearly empty shelves and stood in checkout lines stretching all the way from the front registers to the back of the megastore.

Outside, the floods were forming.

As Megan Lucks surveyed the scene, she realized this was going to be no ordinary storm. The 21-year-old British Columbian was one of a group of about 40 Canadian summer workers with Student Works Painting who were marooned in Mexico this week after Hurricane Odile knocked out power, water and phone service along the Baja California peninsula.

Lucks finally flew home Friday night, among the last of tens of thousands of tourists, 500 of them Canadian, evacuated from the area struck by the Category 3 hurricane.

Her group had arrived in Mexico last Saturday on all-expenses-paid trip — a reward for good performance — but the hurricane hit the very next day.

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What started with as rain soon morphed into 185-kilometre-per-hour winds that coursed through the resort area where Lucks was staying.

'The whole resort was just ruined'

“The whole resort was just ruined, pretty much,” she said over the phone from her hometown of Williams Lake, B.C.

But she would not know that until Monday morning — the hurricane had blotted out the sky Sunday night, when it was at its peak.

“It was so black you couldn’t see what was happening,” Lucks said. “We didn’t know how severe how everything was until we woke up the next morning.”

Bricks from the roof were strewn on the ground. Palm trees were struck down, their fronds scattered. Lawn chairs and garbage bobbed in the swimming pools. Sand and broken pottery littered the floor.

The rooms were intact and nobody was hurt, but widespread looting raged outside.

“There is practically not a single power pole standing. That is the magnitude of the problem that we have,” Osorio Chong said. “It is the worst catastrophe that we have had in terms of the power of a weather event.”

Four deaths have been attributed to the storm. Two Korean men were killed when their vehicle was swept away by rushing water, while state police said another man died in a similar circumstance. The body of a British woman, who had been travelling on a sailboat, was found in the bay of La Paz.

Lucks and her group confined themselves mostly to the resort.

“We cleaned out some of the pools, did the best we could with what we had, played a lot of cards — just kind of took it easy,” she said.

“Some days, people went for food to a little convenience store, which was pretty crowded, and they got sold out pretty fast.

“There were some people that were just solely drinking pop.”

The group was forced to ration its meals, and by the time they left Mexico Friday night, they were down to two meals a day.

There was no tap water available after Sunday night for most guests. Lucks and some of her group on the bottom level could get a small trickle when they turned on their taps, and showered by collecting those drops and pouring them over their heads with ice buckets and cups.

Authorities were still struggling to restore services and calm residents when Lucks’s group left. Mexican officials said 200 electricity workers were deployed in the affected area of Baja California Sur state. Power and water had been restored to only about 20 percent of customers in Los Cabos.

Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexican secretary of communications and transport, said an airlift involving military transport planes and commercial airliners evacuated more than 18,000 tourists in the past two days.

But it took much longer for Lucks’ group, she said, which was so large that people had to be separated if they wanted to fly back earlier.

And Lucks had to wait longer than her friends.

More high winds

The flight back only took the group to Calgary. Lucks was put on a connecting flight to Kelowna, B.C., and had to drive five hours Saturday morning before reaching home.

“I saw one of my friend’s parents in the Calgary airport, and it made me really, really realize that I needed to go home and see my own,” she said.

And none too soon; on Saturday, Tropical Storm Polo was bringing in more high winds, rain and heavy surf to the damaged area.

Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman François Lasalle said in an email that government and private flights continue to operate from the affected area, and about 500 Canadians have been flown home so far.

Officials have made “significant efforts” to locate Canadians in southern Mexico, he added. “At this time, we are not aware of any Canadian citizens in the affected area requiring emergency consular assistance.

“Canadians who are still in the affected area should make their way to the nearest airport if it is safe to do so.”

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